LSE London Seminar: Housing Strategies for the New Mayor

Over the last 18 months, LSE London has been discussing with experts from government, industry and academia about how to accelerate the supply of new housing in London. We now have a new Mayor with the remit to double the housing output in London and to ensure that Londoners are the ones that benefit.

There are enormous challenges. What have been rather wide sweeping policy commitments have to be turned into detailed implementation strategies that encourage everyone involved to up their game. The new Mayor has to make central government policy work in London – not just Help to Buy; starter homes; and shared ownership but also taking account of the impact of a whole range of other government initiatives on incentives and delivery. He must ensure that the growing numbers of starts turn into completions quickly and are followed by a larger pipeline of housing that will meet a wider range of needs. How to provide greater certainty in the ever changing planning environment and to encourage a wider range of developers into the market are major priorities. And there is the revision of the London Plan to set the framework for many years to come.

Our project’s aim has always been to support the Mayor in the objective of accelerating housing development but with the wider goal of working to make London’s overall housing market work better. We therefore took the first opportunity after the election to discuss immediate ways forward.

To this end we invited a number of specialists who have been involved in our project and who understand the issues to discuss how the manifesto pledges and other commitments might be developed into an operational strategy. We will be following up by publishing a blog and other outputs based on our findings from this particular seminar and debate which was held on Tuesday May 10th. The discussion was introduced by Tony Travers, Nancy Holman and Christine Whitehead; they looked at the political, planning and economic aspects of the election result.